In 1976, Mom was checked into a downtown Toronto hospital for what was supposed to be routine surgery to repair a bladder damaged by childbirth. During Mom’s stay, the hospital misplaced her medical chart and she was mistakenly taken off lithium, the drug that had kept her manic-depression in check over the last decade. In less than forty-eight hours, it felt as though she’d been yanked back to that horrible winter of ‘66 when she’d come so terribly undone. Now, as then, she came across like someone possessed: hallucinating, hearing voices, talking gibberish. Only this time her descent was even more rapid and extreme.
With Larry away studying at the University of British Columbia and Karen enrolled at the University of Ottawa, the onus fell on me to help Dad take care of Mom. At twenty-two, I was old enough to understand that if one parent fell badly ill, the “healthy” parent needed to be monitored just as closely, in the event that they buckled under the pressure and grief of seeing their loved one so infirm. Cynthia had already pointed out to me that Dad could barely make it up the stairs of his house lately without losing his breath, and that his diabetes might be a lot further along than any of us realized. The added stress of Mom being sick was sure to send his blood sugars through the roof.
My gut reaction to all this turmoil was to run as far as possible from both my parents; I was afraid I’d be dragged under, ripped away from the comfort zone of my music, derailed from my quest to kick my career up to an ever-higher international level. I’d recently won my first Juno award, for best new artist, and was deep into recording my second album. The pressure of topping my successful first release was consuming me, straining my relationships with everyone in my professional circle and causing me to withdraw from Cynthia. Resisting my impulse to flee, I visited Mom every day at the hospital during my extended lunch break from the recording studio.
Dad would always be there, usually sitting on the bed beside her, stroking her legs over the rumpled, crumb-lined (courtesy of Dad’s daily gifts of food) blankets. Dad’s tenderness towards Mom left me feeling all the more secretly resentful. She’s your wife, I’d think to myself, you deal with her. I can’t afford to lose my focus. I can’t afford to care.
Ashamed of my cold attitude, I did my best to cultivate a shining picture of smiles and good cheer, praying my parents wouldn’t twig to what I was really feeling—that I was frightened to be with them, impatient to get back to my music, anxious that I might catch whatever illness Mom had. My fear turned to helplessness, then sadness whenever I spotted the concern blotting out the usual mischievous glint in Dad’s eyes or detected that extra edge in his voice when he asked me to meet with him and Mom’s psychiatrist.
“Danny, it’s hard for me to stay on top of all the drugs they’re throwing at your mother. You and I need to let her doctor know that there can be no more screw-ups in her medications. Next time, it could kill her.”
Ten years before, any fear and grief Dad felt over Mom’s hospitalization had been lost on me. When you’re twelve, dads don’t feel fear. Dads can fix anything. Now I was too lost in my own terrors to realize that Dad’s response to Mom’s breakdown was pretty much the same as it had been ten years earlier. It was me who’d changed. I was torn between the two opposing principles that Dad had instilled in me. One: Hill males must be unconditional successes in their chosen profession. Two: Hill males must take care of their family, especially the females. But what happens when you have to choose between those two imperatives? What if seeing Mom daily undermined my ability to make a great record? To consider, even for a moment, that there was a choice—Mom’s well-being versus my career—made me feel so torn with guilt that one day I simply stayed in bed, abandoning both my studio commitments and my mom. Unable to live with myself, I made it into the hospital later that evening, cynically timing my visit so that visiting hours would be over an hour after my arrival.
“Oh Danny, you’re going to sing for me!” Mom said, her face lighting up when she saw me. I’d taken along my guitar, knowing that if I strummed and sang I wouldn’t have to think of the proper things to say or how to react if Mom said something peculiar. I could also close my eyes when singing. As long as I could avoid looking at her, really looking at her, the better chance I had of pushing away those memories of ten years ago. As things turned out, I was stronger (or, as Dad had written back then, more “resilient”) than I realized. As was Mom.
She recovered very quickly. She asked that I bring my guitar every visit. Sometimes I sang for her and a slew of other patients in the hospital’s large social room, humbled at how something as natural as live music appeared to soothe them, and me.
I’m not sure if my music helped in Mom’s healing. It was Dad who was always Mom’s magic healer. But something about me singing beside her, and listening to her sing along as if she hadn’t a care in the world, had a way of breaking down my dread of being swept into her vortex of madness. But more than that, Mom’s straight-from-the-heart singing reminded me of how deeply I loved her. And of how much she loved me.
“You behaved just as a son’s supposed to behave,” Dad told me one night once Mom had returned home. “It meant the world to your mother that you went to the hospital every day.”
Dad would never know how close I had come to bolting.
“Where is she?”
“She’s upstairs sleeping.”
“How are you doing, Dad? You look pretty worn out.”
“You know, Danny, any number of external events can throw off your mother’s body chemistry. Even a big social outing or a little dinner party.”
What this had to do with how Dad was doing, I wasn’t quite sure.
“I know that, Dad. But sometimes it feels like life and stress go together.”
“Well, son, there’s stress and then there’s stress. When your mother’s body chemistry goes haywire all of her meds become useless. That’s when she can go off. Just like that.” Dad clapped his hands together, the hollow smacking sound reminding me of him setting me straight in earlier days.
“Try not to excite her too much, Danny. Even funny stories that make her laugh a lot, anything that arouses her emotions suddenly, can throw her off.”
Dad was letting me in on how he was doing after all. He was petrified of losing Mom. How does a husband’s terror at losing his wife compare to a boy’s fear of losing his mother? I could only imagine.
Since childhood I’d been exposed to myriad medical experts, all of whom took great pains to define mental illness as a disease, a specific malfunctioning or misfiring of the brain, frequently reinforcing this explanation with complex, colour-coded illustrations of two minds: one healthy, one wacko. I imagine that they thought this destigmatized the illness for me. It didn’t. Well, cancer’s also a disease, I’d think. So what? How does that make it any easier for the cancer victim, or the victim’s circle of loved ones? Did these doctors think I was some moron? That I believed mental illness was some punishment exacted on my mom or my aunt Margaret by the likes of Satan or, worse still, God?
But the truth of what the doctors were saying clicked in within days of Mom’s release from the hospital. I found it as discomfiting to see Mom go from totally crazy to totally rational as I had the reverse. That the brain could come unglued and then refasten itself so quickly forced me to realize just how fragile we all were.
“Danny, my God, are you listening to a thing I’m trying to tell you?”
Mom had been letting me have it for showing up ninety minutes late for a family dinner. And while I had been listening to her accusations, backed by a few choice examples of my selfishness, I’d also been thinking about all the different “Moms” I’d been exposed to over the years. I’d come to the conclusion that I liked this fiery and ferocious Mom most of all.
There she stood, close to a foot shorter than me, straining her neck so that her glare would catch my eyes just so, and snapped, “Can you kindly tell me what you find so amusing about keeping all of us waiting like this?”
I mumbled something about being caught up in a final mix of my soon-to-be-released single, “Hold On.” Matt and I had just gone through our typical ego flexing about the level of my voice in respect to the level of his orchestration.
“It’s not just dinner. Cynthia was waiting to run with you, and when you never showed up she was left to jog through that Donalda golf course in the dark. Your father would never have allowed me to be all alone in an unlit stretch of park like that at night.”
“I’m really sorry, Mom.”
That’s all Mom was looking for. Once you’d apologized, her anger vanished and the atmosphere felt light, deliciously fresh and clean.
It had gotten to the point where no one, other than Cynthia and my family, would dare take me to task over one of my many acts of thoughtlessness. Managers, agents, publishers, recording engineers, sound and lighting crews: they all depended on me to keep touring and recording and writing so that part of whatever I earned would trickle down to them. Taking me on directly would have been like picking a fight with the boss. My growing throngs of fans treated me like some cult leader, confusing my ability to write about things they could relate to with an indication of saintliness, of existing on some higher moral plane. Still, part of me welcomed this deification, even as I understood how dangerous it could be.
Consistency. That’s what I craved more than anything from my family. If I didn’t love hearing Mom scold me for, among other things, spending too much time on the road and too little time with Cynthia, I did love that she wasn’t in the least cowed by my recent success. With my helter-skelter schedule and the feeling that every phone call represented another surge in my career, I found myself turning to my family more and more to stay, in Dad’s word, “balanced.”
Dinner over, Cynthia had gone to the basement to study, Larry had busied himself packing for his return flight to UBC and Mom and I were doing the dishes.
“You’re gonna laugh when you hear this, Danny, but sometimes your father and I worry that success is coming to you too fast.”
“My entire life has consisted of Dad predicting I was on the road to ruin. Now you’re telling me I’ve peaked too soon. You realize what you’re saying, right? That no matter what I do or don’t do, somehow I’m letting you guys down.”
“I never said anything about feeling let down by you. And parents worry, that’s just the way it is.”
It was a relief to be back in our old familiar patterns. God forbid my parents should ever say, “Congratulations. Everything about your life is humming along perfectly. Don’t change a thing.” Now, that would be a lot of pressure. But even as I expected my family to keep me grounded, Dad, in his unflagging way, constantly reminded me not to confuse staying grounded with getting too comfortable.
“Don’t listen to your mother,” Dad warned, in reference to Mom’s caution that I was working too hard. He was walking Cynthia and me out to the front porch and closing the door, so as not to be overheard. “This is the time in your life when you have to work harder than ever. You’ve got to strike now, while the iron’s hot.”
Larry, more than anyone else in my family, acted as if my success was a forgone conclusion, and that I was just being my ever-predictable self. We’d always been smart enough to make sure that our overweening competitive natures came out only in meaningless sports competitions. We knew better than to compete where it truly mattered: writing in its various forms. We understood that our talent as storytellers, whether manifested in song or prose, should never be turned into a contest, as there was simply too much Hill pride at stake. This allowed us to be each other’s cheerleader; I could assume Larry would one day be a hugely successful author and he could confidently predict my future success as a singer-songwriter without either of us feeling threatened.
I’d never realized how much I’d taken my family dynamics for granted, complaining from time to time about our collective and individual foibles while coming to expect and be comforted by these same traits. Of all the members of my family, I was the one most resistant to change. I had always gone out of my way to do whatever I wanted, and my recent success made it easier to continue to ignore the stuff I had little patience and aptitude for. Karen, meanwhile, welcomed change as enthusiastically as I avoided it. This made sense. The same Don Mills that had proven to be such a surprisingly fertile environment for me—thanks to my assortment of über-motivated friends—had been a washout for my sister, a dreary desert of airless shopping malls, golf courses and female classmates whose conversational repertoire rarely deviated from shoes, purses and boys.
Eager to put Don Mills behind her, Karen had managed, given her excellent grades, to get accepted into the University of Ottawa after grade twelve, rather than the standard grade thirteen. She immediately attached herself to a new, more progressive college crowd. Attending university hundreds of miles from Toronto also gave Karen some much-needed distance from Dad. Living under Dad’s roof could feel like living with a celebrity, mostly because Dad acted the part. Larry and I, thanks to our respective passions, learned as best we could how to cope with the looming shadow of Dad at an early age. Karen began to cope when she moved to Ottawa. And then, just as she started coming into herself, I became a “star,” leaving Karen to feel smothered all over again.
Not that I’d clued into any of this when I met Karen for lunch in an Ottawa café the day after I’d performed two sold-out shows at the National Arts Centre. Scarcely aware of my sister’s suffering when we were growing up together, my enlightenment was about to begin.
“It’s a real drag a lot of the time, Danny. Everyone always coming up to me saying: ‘Are you really Dan Hill’s sister?’ Like I’m some nonperson.”
Unsure of how to respond, I handed Karen the one menu allotted to our table. Barely glancing at it, Karen elaborated, “I’m sick of everyone pretending they want to be my friend, when all they want is to get to you through me.”
The last person in our family to show frustration or anger, Karen’s surprise reaction to my fame hit me like an unexpected blow.
She dropped a recent photo spread of me draping my arms around Prime Minister Trudeau and his wife, Margaret, next to my napkin.
“You don’t even vote for Trudeau,” Karen pointed out.
“What was I supposed to do? Turn Maggie and Pierre away? They showed up at my dressing room surrounded by Mounties.”
“They were just using you for a photo-op.”
Whew, college life was making Karen a lot more opinionated. She even looked different, sporting an outfit that looked like something Dorothy Parker might have worn: sexy yet severe, as if she was dressing for herself and not for some ogling male jerk. Her white V-neck sweater made her brown skin glow, while making me think of Dad reacting to the low neckline. She had a vivaciousness, a crackle about her, no doubt an offshoot from feeling so gloriously unshackled. For the first time, I felt guilty about being famous, as though it had crept up and bitten Karen on the backside, chaining her to our family once more. Our facial features were so similar that we could be mistaken for twins, making her instantly recognizable, to any fan with a discerning eye, as my sister. Looking for a distraction I waved the waitress over.
“Danny, I haven’t even looked at the menu.”
Ignoring Karen, I instructed the waitress to buy a bottle of wine for two girls sitting directly across from us, pointing and giggling in my direction. I imagined they were first-year college students away from home for the first time, with all the attendant possibilities.
“Boy, you’re really enjoying this being famous thing, eh?” Karen mused. The girls’ giggling increased as they toasted us. “That’s pretty sexist, Danny. You know, patronizing male plying pretty young students with drinks. Do you think Cynthia would approve?”
“Fine, Karen. I’ll just tell the girls that you bought the drinks.”
“‘Women.’ That’s what females over twenty are called nowadays, Danny. Unless you see them wearing bibs and being fed by their mothers.”
As Karen reached for another cigarette and popped it in her mouth, daring me to disapprove, it struck me that she was the true family rebel.
“Hey Karen, when the food comes, how ‘bout I swap you half my Greek salad for half your fries?”
“Since when did you become so civilized and proper? In the old days we’d just reach across the table and grab whatever food we wanted from somebody’s plate.”
“Not in front of Dad, we didn’t.”
“I’m not talking about home. But at restaurants it was a free-forall. Now that you’re hanging out with the prime minister I don’t expect you’d remember our family outings.”
Because Karen loaded up and fired off one of her zingers so rarely, when she did, she always hit her mark. I opted for my usual defence tactic. Teasing.
“Dad tells me you’ve got lots of boyfriends now.” What Dad had really said was that, because the Ottawa college campus was less colour conscious (due in part to a high population of Haitian and African students), for the first time Karen was “enjoying the company of men.”
“Hmmm. So you and Dad are still the family gossips, eh?”
Good deflection, I thought, before posing what seemed a fairly neutral question.
“Are you coming home for Christmas?”
“No. I’ll be staying with Edmond and his family in Trois-Pistoles, Quebec.”
“Have you told Dad yet?”
“Don’t start with Dad, okay? He’s fine with you and Cynthia living together, but the thought of me shacking up with Edmond for two weeks over Christmas has him up in arms. I’m passing along The Female Eunuch and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex for you to give to Dad once you’re back in Toronto.”
“I’ve had the hots for Germaine Greer since I wrote a book report on her in grade eleven. Though she lost a bit of her sex appeal when she wrote about how liberating it was for a woman to taste her own menstrual blood.”
“You have to turn everything I say into a joke, don’t you? And who don’t you have the hots for?”
“Whoa there. I’m being what I’ve always been. The family clown.”
I might have considered Karen’s unlikely burst of temper a healthy sign, except that the slight wobble in her voice suggested more than just anger. Or was I the unstable one? To the point where I couldn’t bear my sweet little sister growing up and offering an opinion?
Karen, competing in an ongoing Hill family movie bursting with four overbearing leads, was clearly having none of this “cute little Lena Horne” crap anymore. So much for family dynamics remaining unchanged. Certainly, Karen was hardly the first student to enter college and suddenly view the world through a new, radicalized lens. Was I jealous, threatened by her superior education, her curiosity and determination to, as Dad might put it, “expand her horizons”? But the way she swung from Malcolm vs. Martin, to separatism vs. federalism, to Dad’s vs. my chauvinism as though, if I didn’t fall into line with her views, life might just as well be over, reminded me of the one other person who used to carry on in such an intense manner, before she … I didn’t dare finish the thought.
“Karen, I’m not about to be drawn into an argument with you on the reasons why Zora Neale Hurston’s books aren’t included in any college curriculum. By now you know I try never to participate in a contest I might lose.”
“Christ, Danny. You’re even patronizing like Dad.”
“What do I have to be patronizing about? I know nothing about nothing except singing and writing songs.”
“You’ve always known what you’ve wanted. You with your famous killer instincts, unable to see past your next guitar chord. Growing up with you was like living with a ghost.”
Ahhh. That’s what felt forced about this lunch. About this new, tougher Karen. Not so much that she was opinionated and angry. But that she was angry at me.
“Danny, you dropped out of our family long before you’d physically left home.”
I wanted to tell Karen that I wasn’t as tough and selfish as I made myself out to be. That I loved her. At the moment, however, I was having a tough time warming to her.
“Lunch is on me, Karen,” I announced.
As the two of us approached the cash register the waiter announced that there would be no charge for our meal.
“You mean it’s on the house?” Karen asked enthusiastically, as though she’d just won something. How refreshing, to see her so excited by something so trivial.
“Nope. The two young ladies paid your bill.”
Karen greeted the news with a smirk.
“You’re something else, Danny.”
I grabbed hold of Karen’s hand and we headed to her apartment. Glancing down at our interlocking fingers, I couldn’t get over our contrasting skin tones. There it was, staring back up at me, the defining difference between us. Not only that her skin was several shades darker than mine, but that she thought much more deeply about her skin colour, its emotional and psychic ramifications, than I ever did—at least consciously.
“What is it, Danny? Was it all my teasing? I’m only getting you back for all those years you tricked me into eating insects.”
“Actually Karen, it was grabbing hold of your hand so automatically. It made me think of Dad, always carefully steering Mom out of whatever restaurant they’d finished eating at.”
“If you really want to know, Danny, this is how Dad takes Mom’s hand. I know ‘cause he grabs mine the same way.” As Karen demonstrated, her smile returned, bashful and adorable.
Watching Karen leap up the stairs, tossing “See ya, brother!” over her shoulder as her front door swung shut, it finally dawned on me that Karen had always been independent, much more so than I. I simply hadn’t bothered to pay attention. My wilful blindness (and deafness) had started around the time Karen was thirteen, when she said, “I wish I’d been born Blacker. Then people would know my race. I hate all the questions about whether I’m East Indian or half this or part that.”
How dare she? It was okay to talk about what it meant to be Black from a political standpoint. But to even allude to any personal feelings or ambivalence about your own racial background (your own inherited and individual shade of colour at that) was wholly unacceptable. You were who and what you were without question, speculation or uncertainty. Dad had never come right out and explicitly said this, it was just one of those things he’d made clear, in that so obvious it didn’t have to be explained way of his. There I was, hiding beneath my stocking cap as Karen brazenly announced to the family that she wished she lived in a country where biracial backgrounds were far more commonplace—a country where one-eighth or one-quarter or one-half or one drop Black meant, unequivocally, all Black.
I for one wasn’t going to admit that I sometimes wished for the opposite miracle, that one day—presto—my skin would be Donny Osmond white, my eyes Paul Newman blue, my lips Sean Connery thin. Unlike me, Karen had the guts to take the political out of being Black and make it personal. Which put pressure on me to own up to my very contradictory feelings, when I was just a confused adolescent who wished all this race stuff would simply disappear in a pretty cloud of guitar chords and love songs.
So where did all this leave me now? As I strolled along the Rideau Canal, nodding at people who recognized me, I wondered if I was a complete fake, playing the part of the great new Canadian singer-songwriter who’d sidestepped the whole race thing by flinging himself into making his mark on the world. Did I really think that pop-star success meant a free pass on the inner contortions of racial angst? While Larry’s university fiction sparkled with the influence of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, my singing voice came closest to resembling Don Henley or Elton John, much as I longed to sound like Marvin Gaye or Donny Hatahway. Had I become the family’s white sheep? Was this part of Karen’s anger at me? Was this part of my anger at myself? There was no easy answer. My solution was to shut out the questions, the way I’d tried my best, as a teenager, to shut out my sister’s ideas, confusing my refusal to listen to her opinions with her not having any opinions at all.